[Tech] ProLiant Servers... Oh how you make me want to crush thee. Part 1

Small Flashback:
So last week I decided to go through and take one of our unused servers (in fact the only unused one at the moment) and install a Linux based operating system (I was jumping between Xubuntu and Ubuntu) and run a BIND server on it (That's a DNS server for you non-techie people. DNS stands for Domain Name System, which is kind of like a phone book for computers in a very loose, general sense).

Now, this was an old Windows 2000 server that was just sitting there, running all the time doing pretty much nothing... so began the task of compression of the current data (it was only using a few gigs of space) and changing the partition information to free up extra disk space for the new operating system.

Here is a very basic example of what was done for the non-techie people who read this:

Original hard drive usage
Total : 36GB
[Windows.......||...............Unused hard drive space.................]

So basically it was only a small portion of the drive that was being used and it was one large partition. Well, the trick is that this is a ProLiant server (Compaq/HP) which means it has to run two hard drives. So really it's 2 hard drives of 36GB size and it's running RAID-1 (basically means it's mirroring data from one hard drive to the other automatically, so you have 76GB of hard drive space total, but only 36GB usable because a mirror copy is being made on the second drive).

The compression and reallocation of the partition went unhindered and was successful. It was easy as pie, really. I used a freeware program to do it and it did it very effectively and quickly (I used the built-in Ubuntu partition software on the Live CD).

So once I had that done I began the steps toward installing an Linux operating system onto the other partition, which I had set up specifically for Linux. Windows was booting just fine, I just had to go through and install the Ubuntu, let it install GRUB (a boot loader), and be on my merry way...

Well, it wasn't that simple. The install disk failed 85% of the way through the install.

*****

And so concludes part one of this... the SmartStart media is now extracted and it's time to burn it to disk and leave the room. I'll update the blog more once I'm done.

[Tips]

Who'd have thought... Toothpaste to clean oxidization from your headlights? It works!